Present mobile telephone systems attempt to provide the user with increasingly versatile services. This goal is shared by IMT-2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications for the Year 2000) services which aim to offer high-quality speech/audio signal transmission, high-rate data transfer, photograph transmission and video image transmission. In addition, the IMT-2000 service encompasses interactivity, multimedia electric mail, video conferences and target location determination, for example.
Transferring different data requires different symbol rate and signal transmission power. In the present radio systems the symbol rate is not optimized for the changing channel conditions since the symbol rate of several signals cannot be adapted in one physical channel. If, for example, two service signals transmitted over the same physical channel have differing quality requirements when received and the signals act differently when the delay profile of the channel changes, problems affecting the power level of the two signals occur. Such a problem typically arises when Reed-Solomon coding and convolution coding are used together. When the channel delay profile changes, a situation may arise when the first signal in accordance with the example is barely acceptable in terms of quality, while the other signal is of unnecessarily high quality. The situation is particularly critical when a service signal only requiring a low symbol rate forces a service signal requiring a high symbol rate to use extra transmission power. The prior art solutions fail to resolve this disparity. Unresolved, the disparity will cause interference over the whole area of the radio system.